Explicitly antimythological, ["The Poem as Mask"] is also an act of
self-criticism, written in direct opposition to an earlier "Orpheus." The older
poem, constructed like a court masque of the English tradition, uses the power of music as
organizing symbol, centers on a static drama of transformation, and ends with a song of
unity. The figure of Orpheus -- the poet reborn as a god, the fragments of the human
reunited as the divine, a transcendent experience that gives power to the self -- is a
motif of great resonance for Rukeyser. Yet, in "The Poem as Mask," she brings
her earlier poem into question by deliberate acts of self-criticism, showing that the myth
she had so lovingly chosen and carefully shaped is an impediment to her quest. "The
Poem as Mask" states that she had censored her feelings, writing him, god,
myth, when she meant me, human, my life. As a woman, she had
been unable to affirm her "torn life" -- the loss of love, a dangerous birth,
the rescue of self and newborn child. Her former use of the myth blunted her sense of
personal reality; it was a "mask" of covering, not a "masque" of unity
and joy. So she makes a vow at the end of the poem: "No more masks! No more
mythologies!" But while this vow is understandably antimythological, a cry against
alien patterns imposed on womens lives, the poems final lines present a
renewed myth based on concrete feelings of peace, blessing, and wholeness. The new myth
comes from within the self, as the orphic experiences in the historical life of the poet
that offer inspiration and rebirth.

Punning on the multiple meanings of mask and masque, the first stanza
owns up to the fact that, in an earlier work (her long poem, "Orpheus" [1949],
which was itself composed as a masque), the poet had employed forms of disguise, masking
both experience and identity, and had thereby diminished true Orphic power. The disguise,
in short, produced only an elaborate entertainment, akin to the ornate but essentially
trivial court masques of the seventeenth century. The maenads tearing Orpheus to pieces is
a physical sensation she knows through childbirth; but what she successfully rescued from
death, through her own body, was a child rather than a lover. The storehouse of symbolic
structures which we call our literary heritage, however, offered neither models nor
validation for the importance of that kind of tearing and rescue; only
"memory" had preserved the masked truth of the event intact.

Quite literally, then, the first stanza becomes itself a mask, at once exposing the
earlier poem's masquerade and, with that, serving as prelude to the significant action
which is to follow; that is, the second stanza's fuller explanation of the deception and
the consequent revelation of the poet's (painful) ecstasy in childbirth. The myth's
assertion of the Orphic power that comes only through the ecstasy of dying is here
displaced by Rukeyser's assertion of the ecstasy of bringing forth life. And, as the
closing lines indicate, this ecstasy, this "aggressive act of truth-telling"
also renders Orphic power, as life replaces death and fragments become whole:

No more masks! No more mythologies!
Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me and with their own music.

Repossessing the significance of the "memory / of my torn life," Rukeyser is
liberated from a sense of "exile from myself." No longer unable to
speak,"capable now of renewed--but also different--music, Echo is returned to speech.

Even without the simple biographical facts to shoehorn into a readingof the
poet's own charged experience of waking out of anesthesia after a cesarean birth and being
told of the hysterectomy also performed on her, without her consent, at the same
timethe poem reads explosively, with the famous masks and mythologies still flashing
their exclamation points like stoplights. Through memory, the mortally wounded psyche is
healed and rescued with the child, and the god lifts his hand as if Stravinsky himself had
orchestrated it, in a new and even stronger and more disturbing mythic rite, this time
from the deliberately female vantage point of that cleft speaker, regathered as Orpheus,
maenad, and mother.

The poem is embedded in my own twentieth-century history as well as Rukeyser's, part of
a seventies movement primed for sisterhood, but not quite ready for mothers, especially if
they were ours. Reprinted in 1993, first released in 1973, Florence Howe's anthology of
feminist poetry, No More Masks! chooses Rukeyser's negation of the practice of
masking for its blazon. "The Poem as Mask," however, performs a series of much
more complicated maneuvers of recognition and retrieval, maneuvers that hardly dismiss the
adoption of masks or personae. And the famous exclamations seem more a question of which
persona, rather than a dismissal of all personas: "No more masks! No more
mythologies!" is one moment in Rukeyser's poem.

In an interview published in 1972 by William Packard, when asked specifically about
this line, Rukeyser agrees that when it is spoken, "the myth begins again." The
lifted hand becomes an acceptance of myth both paradoxical and necessary that occurs
"[a]s soon as the refusal is made" (129). By the time actual memory confronts
myth through the reality of the birthing female, exile from the self is undone, and under
the baton of the god's lifted hand, the shattered fragments of the self enact a literal
movement of recollection and raise "their own music." And their own new
mythology.

. . . Her makeover of the Orpheus legend clearly had two aims: one, to reconnect poetry
to its older roots in prophecy and wisdom literature, crippling discourse in favor of
image; two, to provide a poetics that would acknowledge the full range of female
experience as not incidental to poetry, but essential to it. Over many years, Rukeyser
strove to take a male myth of the genesis of poetry and recover it for women, thereby to
ground herself both theoretically and practically as woman and poet, with neither category
ever to subtract energy from the other. . . . another creation myth is germinating inside
the story of the origins of the female poetic voice. It is a myth that may worry the
anti-essentialist feminist. In "The Poem as Mask" Rukeyser proposes the founding
moment of a female self-recognition, and her simultaneous rejection of Orpheus and
acquisition of her own voice, as the moment of a violated childbed, when her fertility is
attacked in the instance of its expression. And yet, the female splits; gives birth; and
suffering, acquires voice. In a split that also heals the gap between writing and
livingbetween poetry and lifethe poem couples or splices an "actual"
autobiographical memory with a fictive or mythic recognition. But Rukeyser bears down on
female memory or authentic experience as that which gives rise to the new myth, in which a
newer god lifts hisand it is still hisenabling hand. In "The Poem
as Mask" Orpheus may be a woman finally with the right mask on, clutching the right
mythology, but the deity hasn't changed his pronoun.

I can imagine critical responses rejecting the implied pronatalism of this Orpheus
myth, its potentially coercive suggestion that the catalyst of female creativity be
childbirth, in a remake of Freud's movie Anatomy as Destiny, this time as produced and
directed by a feminist. Yet Rukeyser's imagery can also be read nonprescriptively, and as
generated from the context of a particular life and history that may not be pared away
from a reading of the poems. Rukeyser in the postwar years is not just scorched, but fired
by the experience of birthing and raising a son in the teeth of convention and through
ambiguous paternity; fighting for her right even to have this child, she rewrites her
creation myth: in "The Poem as Mask" both mask and mythology are cast aside,
only to be retrieved and re-shaped.

But the recuperative role that motherhood plays is clear: the self split open in
self-mothering is the cloven female body, despite the male's appropriation of midwifing
and control over procreation, and despite the wound to her fertility that the poet
undergoes in her hysterectomy, on the way to a deliverance both psychic and actual. The
new myth is this female body whose wounds produce the Orphic song, its emblem the
poet-mother and child. Against the surgical knife of male cancellation, body and family
become female: first mother, then tentatively, then more and more strongly, bisexual or
lesbian. And perhaps a shouldering aside of the male, except as son, becomes a necessity
for a strong woman poet who has just undergone four years of a global conflagration in
which militarism sidelined or dismissed or victimized women.

[Editor's Note: Excerpted from a much longer essay. See the original book for the full
text]